In Its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816-1876 9780773561090

Citation preview

In Its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816-1876

The Seminary of Montreal - a French, male religious community - had crucial functions in pre-industrial Montreal. Since the 166os the seminary, which was both seigneur of the island of Montreal and its titular parish priest, had been an integral part of the seigneurial, clerical, and merchant elite dominating Montreal. Early in the nineteenth century the seminary came under increasing attack from new forces in Montreal society, particularly the emerging industrial bourgeoisie, which resented the seminary's seigneurial expropriations. The collapse of the rebellions of 1837-8 ended two decades of crisis for the seminary and assured its survival. Although seigneurialism on the island of Montreal was gradually dismembered, the seminary's corporate powers, its right of recruitment, and its income were guaranteed. At the same time, the seminary's growing social and ideological functions in industrial society insured its protection by an appreciative bourgeoisie. In Its Corporate Capacity compares the seminary's pre-industrial forms of income to its new capitalist revenues from land sales, subdivision developments, bonds, and rentier income from office, warehousing, and urban-housing properties. As its income changed, management of the seminary took new forms. The business office expanded from a single priest/manager into a professionalized operation which included an accountant, architect, surveyor, clerk, and several notaries and lawyers. The seminary's banking and record-keeping operations were also brought into line with modern business practice. Given its new7 revenues, corporate powers, and social mandate from the state, the seminary was able to play a central role in the development of popular schools in Montreal, in financing and directing social institutions like hospitals, workshops, and hospices and — through the pulpit, newspapers, libraries, and national societies - in legitimizing the changing class structure of industrializing Montreal. Brian Young, who teaches history at McGill University, is also the author of George-Etienne Cartier: Montreal Bourgeois.

This page intentionally left blank

In Its Corporate Capacity The Seminary of Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816-1876 BRIAN YOUNG

McGill-Queen's University Press Kingston and Montreal

McGill-Queen's University Press 1986 ISBN 0-7735-0554-7 Legal deposit 2nd quarter 1986 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Young, Brian J., 1940— In its corporate capacity Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-7735-0554-7 1. Grand-Seminaire de Saint-Sulpice - History. 2. Seigniorial tenure - Quebec (Province) Montreal (Region) - History. * 3. Business enterprises — (Quebec (Province) — Montreal (Region) History. I. Title. Hc II8.M6v68 1986 338-7'61333322'o971427

C86-093325-3

The cover illustration is based on a watercolour of the Old Seminary, Montreal, by H. Bunnett, 1888, in the McCord Museum, McGill University, Montreal.

To R.R.

The concluding request of the Seminary, respectfully presented to the wellmeaning advocates of the Indians, is to pause a little, lest, by proceeding further, they should, though unwittingly, be assailing the very basis of all regularly organized human society, and of natural justice — the rights of property. (Sulpician pamphlet, 1876)

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Figures viii Tables

ix

List of Appendixes Introduction

x

xi

1 Holy Housekeeping: The Company and Business Management 3 2 Political Relations of the Seminary in the Transition 38 3 Seigneurialism on Seminary Lands 61 4 Freedom of Property: The Commutation of Property Privilege from Seigneurial to Freehold Tenure 88 5 From Seigneur to Capitalist: The Balance Sheet 108 6 Land Developers: Subdivision on Two Seigneurial Domains 131 7 Class Legitimation Conclusion

168

Notes 229 Bibliography Index 287

263

150

Figures

1 Seigneuries of the Seminary of Montreal, 1840 8 2 Sulpicians in Canada, 1657—1900 9 3 Main Floor of the Seminary, 1840 11 4 Administrative Structure of the Seminary in the Nineteenth Century 13 5 Island of Montreal, 1840 19 6 Debt-Recognition Contracts on the Seigneuries of Montreal and Saint-Sulpice, 1 835-49 78 7 Commutations Notarized by the Seminary of Montreal, 1840-80 95 8 Total Seminary Income, 1841—76 no 9 Income from Seigneurial Sources, 1841—76 111 10 Sources of Seminary Income, 1834-74

112

11 Net Rental Income from Urban Properties, 1842-76 117 12 Southern Part of the Island of Montreal, 1840 132 13 Saint-Gabriel Subdivision, 1872 135 14 Subdivision of Mountain Domain, 1880 144 15 Social Investment by the Seminary in Montreal, Operating and Capital Costs, 1841-76 166

Tables

1 House Operating Expenses, 1864 14 2 Seminary Lawyers, 1816-76 36 3 Debt Recognitions Contracted by Notary Andre Jobin, 4 April 1842-24 June 1843 79 4 Professions of Purchasers of Seigneurial Arrears, 1835-76 84 5 Block Transfer of Bad Seigneurial Debts, 1866-7 86 6 Commutators Declaring an Unskilled Occupation, 1840-59 102 7 Commutations on the Island of Montreal Excluding City and Parish, pre-1859 104 8 Interest-bearing Bonds and Stocks Held by the Seminary, 1841—76 122 9 Seminary Debts, 1826-55 126 10 Private and Auction Sales on the SaintGabriel Domain, 1860-79 14° 11 Home-site Prices by Occupation: Mountain Subdivision, 1859-78 147

Appendixes

1 Individuals Attacking the Seminary's Seigneurial Privileges, 1816—40 177 2 Debt-Recognition Contract, 1842 182 3 Notarial Acts Completed by Seminary Notaries, 1835-80 184 4 Excerpt of Transfer of Seigneurial Debts due to Seminary, 1862 186 5 Summary of Ordinance of 1840 188 6 Commutations of Seminary of Montreal, 1840—80 190 7 Commutation under Ordinance of 1840 192 8 Commutators of Property Evaluated at over £5,000, 1840—59 194 9 Laws Affecting Seigneurial Tenure and Disposal of Revenues, 1840—73 204 10 Seminary Income, 1795-1839 209 11 Seminary Income, 1841-1915 210 12 Bonds, Debentures, and Shares Held by the Seminary, 1882-1909 212 13 Procurator's Ordinary and Capital Expenditures, 1805-39 214 14 Procurator's Ordinary and Capital Expenditures, 1840-1915 216 15 Auction Sales on the Saint-Gabriel Domain, 1853-9 220 16 Conditions of Sale of Building Lots on Mountain Domain, 1860—80 224 17 Major Capital Expenses of Seminary for Social Purposes, "1848-78 225

Introduction

Nineteenth-century Canadian historiography over-emphasizes the staple, politics, ethnicity, nation-building, "last spikes," and progress. Canadian business history, strongly influenced by Alfred Chandler and the Business History Review, often concentrates on the innovative and the entrepreneurial.1 In the broad brush strokes of cod, the St Lawrence River, railway builders, and upwardly mobile immigrants with which we have drawn our economic and business history, essential indicators of social relations such as debt, law, institutions, and the power of the landed proprietor have become secondary or, worse, have been delegated to what one historian calls "the stuff of romantic melodrama."2 To understand how the business institution central to this book functioned, contract, property condition, privilege, or class cannot be marginalized as incidental thorns on the road to material success or nationhood. This institution, in its first century and a half in Canada, lived on seigneurial income expropriated from rural and urban censitaires. Over the nineteenth century the company's business operations were transformed into capitalist forms. This history concentrates then on one institution's adjustment to fundamental change in its property relations and the implications for one company of the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. This perspective coincides with important themes in European history: the Counter-Reformation, seigneurialism, institutionalization, church-state relations, industrialization, revolution, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. It is in pre-revolution France that the company has its roots and from which it assumed the structure, constitution, and ideological reflexes that still govern it today. The subject is old, Catholic, and French - and yet central to the urbanization and industrialization experience of Canada's most important nineteenth-

xii

Introduction

century city. Instead of a "visible hand," this study emphasizes institutional persistence, changing class relations, and the power of property in Canadian history. Since the seventeenth century the Seminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montreal has had its Canadian headquarters on Notre-Dame Street in central Montreal. In 1840 the all male company had twenty-four members in Canada, over three-quarters of whom were born in France. The Sulpicians abandoned their families and personal independence to live by the constitution of a Roman Catholic religious community. Their business officers - some Sulpician and some lay - fulfilled various accounting, notarial, managerial, and clerking tasks in the seminary office. Instead of the entrepreneurial cliches of the cigar, the handshake, and the private railway car, our "heroes" moved in the quiet and often anonymous world of desks, vaults, refectories, and registry offices. The tools of their trade were the wax seal, the survey, the Coutume de Paris, the mortgage, the bond coupon, and, above all, the contract; behind their paper, particularly after 1840, was the coercive power of the state. The Seminaire de Saint-Sulpice was founded in seventeenth-century Paris to train a reformed Roman Catholic clergy. Powerful and aristocratic, the company participated in the founding of Montreal in the 16408, became perpetual rectors of the parish of Montreal, and acquired the seigneuries of Montreal, Two Mountains, and SaintSulpice. Perennially Galilean, the seminary was always characterized by a political suppleness that allowed it to prosper on two continents despite French monarchical crises, the British conquest of Canada, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic upheavals. This political machiavellianism contrasted sharply with the seminary's moral and social rigidity, its vigorous training of priests, its strict attitude to nuns and other female occupation-groups, and its disciplining of popular classes - useful institutional characteristics in the unstable social environment of nineteenth-century Montreal. The seminary had four civil functions: direction of its seigneuries, the operation of its Indian mission, the provision of various social and educational services in Montreal, and the secular functions of the Lower-Canadian priest. By the early nineteenth century it had over 3,000 censitaires on its three seigneuries, and the city of Montreal was within the seminary's parish and seigneury. The use of the term "feudalism" in nineteenth-century Lower Canada must be explained. For historians like Maurice Dobb, Kohachiro Takahashi, and Guy Bois, the term implies a mode of production in which the landlord lived off the peasant surplus; these dues might be paid in direct labour, kind, or cash. This expropri-

xiii

Introduction

ation, the root of social relationships in feudal society, was assured by supporting judicial and political structures. The work of historians like Louise Dechene emphasizes the dynamism and rigour of seigneurialism in New France, and several recent studies suggest that seigneurialism became even more exploitive and authoritarian after the conquest.3 Taken from this perspective, feudalism seems a particularly apt term to describe the seminary's property and social relations, the forms of its income before 1840, and, in a large sense, its historic comportment in the Montreal region from the 16408 into the nineteenth century. The first chapters describe the seminary's business operations in an environment of feudal relations and as a company whose primary income came from seigneurial levies collected from the holders of its ceded lands (censitaires). Historians of the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism emphasize the new mode of production with its changes in the form of work, its new technologies, its expanding market economy, and its evolving forms of capital. This process was accompanied by modernization of the state and by a bourgeois ideology that gave prominence to parliamentary institutions, individualism, and freedom of property. It also led to the formation of new social groups and a polarization of class tensions of which the rebellions of 1837-8 were a prominent manifestation. One important element in the transformation of land and labour into commodities was the change in land tenure from a seigneurial to a freehold condition.4 It was this factor, the pressure on its seigneurial privileges, that marked the seminary's passage across the transition most immediately and most profoundly. The seminary's history suggests strongly the quarter from which originated the attacks on its feudal property relations and explains the choice of 1816 as one perimeter of this study. Until the early nineteenth century - and under both French and British colonial regimes - the seminary coexisted nicely with the Montreal elite, a group dominated by merchants. The fact that there was no contradiction between feudalism and commercial capitalism in postconquest Montreal surprised historian Donald Creighton but the phenomenon had its counterpart in feudal Japan, France, and England.5 In the post-conquest period, Montreal merchants cemented this alliance by marrying into seigneurial families or other forms of gentrification, by themselves buying seigneuries, or by borrowing seigneurial capital.6 By the early years of the nineteenth century, however, some artisans and merchants were making the transition to an industrial mode of production. Seigneurialism itself, it must be emphasized, was not incompatible with this form of production as evidenced by the industrial operations of seigneurs at Lavaltrie,

xiv Introduction

Terrebonne, and Beauharnois. Nor was the seminary hostile to industrial development. At Lac Oureau on the Saint-Sulpice seigneury, the seminary had leased sites on which had been built by 1845 a carding mill, flour mill, tannery, two sawmills, and an oat-grinding mill in addition to the banal mill. And the seminary's large, institutional construction projects, such as Notre-Dame Church (1824— 9), were important in encouraging the accumulation of capital and the passage of masons, carpenters, and joiners from an artisanal to industrial mode.7 But industrial producers and large capitalist landowners objected vigorously to the impediment that the seminary's seigneurial privileges represented for their milling, manufacturing, and landspeculation projects in the immediate Montreal area. Resentful of the seminary's use of feudal instruments to obstruct what Harry Braverman describes as "the clearing of the market place" and what Albert Soboul calls the "autonomy of capitalist production," they sniped at the seminary's milling privileges, at its application of the mutation levy (lods et ventes} on suburban and urban land improvements, at its control over waterways and power sites, and at its domain which straddled and blocked potential industrialization along the Lachine Canal.8 The battle lines were formally drawn in 1816 when the seminary was forced to initiate a lawsuit against a Scottish-born miller, William Fleming. In flagrant violation of the seigneur's milling monopoly or banalite and in direct competition with a nearby banal mill recently rebuilt by the seminary, Fleming bought land near Lachine and constructed a stone windmill that utilized improved grindstones and other new technology. In his first year of operation Fleming ground only rice and barley but in March 1816 he began grinding the wheat of local farmers. Fleming's mill threatened the seigneur's investment, short-circuited the feudal relationship between seigneur and censitaire, and upset traditional town-country relations. When accused in 1816 of "disturbing, molesting and disquieting" the seigneur "in open, quiet, peaceable and lawful possession and enjoyment" of a milling right which the seminary had exercised at Lachine since the seventeenth century, Fleming refused to demolish his mill and expressed willingness to appeal to the highest English courts for judgment against the seminary's monopoly. Hiring prominent lawyers, he attacked the seminary's corporate titles and its very right to hold property. Eight years later, largely because of the seminary's successful stalling tactics, the case was still dragging in Canadian appeal courts. The Fleming mill remained standing, and seminary opponents stepped up their demands in the 18208 for the

xv Introduction

dismantling of the "monkish institution" and its feudal properties which were "shackling and obstructing" industry.9 Fearful for its very existence, the seminary backed off consistently in the two decades before the rebellions of 1837-8. Confiding to the Colonial Office that "feudal rights are always odious," the superior of the seminary negotiated to cede the company's seigneurial lands in return for a cash indemnity.10 With its property titles in doubt, the institution bought land in the name of individual Sulpicians, only transferring it to the seminary's name after confirmation of its corporate powers in 1840. The Fleming case symbolizes the crisis of one feudal institution in the face of emerging industrial producers. As seigneur of the island of Montreal, the seminary was on the front line. At the same time, the increasing complexity of economic activities in Montreal was lessening the significance of the traditional alliance between seigneur and merchant. Benefiting from the seminary's weakened position and its reluctance to use the courts to assure its feudal property rights, many Montreal censitaires refused to pay lods et ventes in the decades before 1837—8. Industrial producers were not alone in resisting seigneurial levies. The peasantry poached, cheated, concealed their property mutations, switched to crops not subject to seigneurial levies, milled at non-banal mills, and otherwise avoided payment of their seigneurial dues; hundreds accumulated interest-free seigneurial debts with the seminary.11 Nor could the seminary count on support from other groups in the popular classes or from francophone professionals. Admittedly, conservative leaders like Louis-Joseph Papineau did cap more radical elements and supported the seminary by integrating seigneurialism, Roman Catholicism, and the Lower-Canadian civil law tradition to the "nation." Some patriote leaders had attended the Sulpician college and others benefited from seigneurialism through their professional fees; Papineau himself was a seigneur. But the more popular, industrial, and revolutionary elements turned on the feudal and pro-British seminary. Democratic, anti-monopolistic, and often anti-clerical, they attacked clerical power in education and the seminary's attempts to settle its property and corporate difficulties through private negotiations with the Colonial Office. Their position was made clear in the 1838 Proclamation of Independence for Lower Canada which demanded the immediate and outright abolition of feudal tenure and the annulment of all seigneurial debts.12 The Ordinance of 1840 permitted censitaires to transform their properties into freehold tenure by the capitalization of their ground rents (cens et rentes, lods et ventes); the seminary could not refuse a

xvi Introduction

legitimate request for commutation. The ordinance also ended the mortmain restriction on the alienation of seminary land and forced it to sell the Saint-Gabriel domain along the Lachine Canal. At the same time as it reduced the seminary's importance in property relations in Montreal, the ordinance confirmed the seminary's corporate status, enabling it to enforce seigneurial levies and to collect seigneurial arrears. From 1840 to 1859 the seminary's social relations reflected the existence in Lower Canada of seigneurial and freehold property regimes. Few rural censitaires had the means to commute their lands, thus leaving the seminary an important seigneurial force in the countryside. This persistence of feudal power was increased under the terms of the Ordinance of 1840 by the formalization of seigneurial debts in the form of interest-bearing, alienable contracts. In Montreal, large numbers of censitaires with a surplus opted to commute, thus removing their properties from the sphere of seigneurial levies. The fattening of seminary coffers with new forms of income from commutations and land sales did not escape the attention of Montrealers looking for capital for their industrial projects. By 1849 the seminary had been dragooned into becoming, along with the British American Land Company, the largest private Canadian investor in the Grand Trunk Railway. Between 1876 and 1909 it invested in ten transportation companies and fifteen other industrial companies; in 1915 its portfolio of municipal bonds was over $1.2 million. These deepening capitalist property relations were accompanied by the delegation to the seminary of new supportive functions in the ideological and social sectors. Its expanding cash income, its structure, and its two centuries of mission and parish experience made it a useful vehicle for legitimation, social order, and ethnic harmony in industrializing Montreal. After 1837 the seminary had an expanding planning, financial, and management function in the Roman Catholic institutional sector. It structured churches, newspapers, a reading-room, libraries, and popular, secondary, and theological school facilities, as well as a variety of welfare, national, and selfhelp organizations. The choice of 1876 as the terminal date of this study makes sense from the standpoint of both historical conjuncture and seminary records. A six-decade period permits placing the institutional experience against relatively long-term economic and social change. The Ordinance of 1840 - the crucial political act for the seminary - comes in the centre of the period, thus facilitating examination of the seminary's feudal and capitalist property relations. The changes

xvii Introduction instituted by the ordinance coincided with an acceleration of the industrialization process in Montreal: enlargement of the Lachine Canal, construction of railways, introduction of the factory system. In this regime the seminary assumed the functions of a deposit bank, mortgage lender, and important urban rentier. Treating land and labour as disposable commodities, it sold off seigneurial debts and developed suburban subdivisions on its domains. By the 18705 industrial capitalism had reached a new stage. The stock market, new corporate forms, transcontinental corporations, changing technology, and the bureaucratization and professionalization of business organizations forced further changes in seminary business operations. The seminary's growing marginalization from direct economic influence was accentuated in 1876 when the Canadian government paid off the debt it had assumed for rural lods et ventes. The 18708 also marked the end of a business era for the seminary. Two procurators, Joseph Comte and Jacques-Victor Arraud, ran the business office from 1823 to 1876. Comte's organization, managerial stamp, and many of the accounting records begun in the 18205 terminated with Arraud's transfer to other duties. Given this concentration on the institution, its business management and its property relations, there is little treatment of production and distribution in the countryside, of the agricultural "crisis" in the early nineteenth century, or of changes in food production. Nor, given the institutional focus, is there systematic attention to the popular classes. And although it might have been expected in this study of a religious community, theological questions and the internecine struggle between the seminary and bishop of Montreal have been subordinated; they are amply treated in the works of Lucien Lemieux, Leon Pouliot, Robert Rumilly, Richard Chabot, Nadia Eid, Gilles Chausse, Marcel Lajeunesse, Louis Rousseau, and James Lambert.'3 Two technical explanations are necessary. The first draft of this text left quotes in their original language, usually French. In response to suggestions of both the publisher and evaluators of the manuscript, I have translated all quotes into English. The variety of currencies used across the period posed recurring problems. Leaving "kind" aside, three currencies were common in seminary accounts in the period 1816-80. Until 1840 the seminary kept its books in livres tournois, referred to in legal documents as livres anciens cows. In 1840-1 most business office accounts were converted to Halifax currency and then in 1862 to dollars. Throughout the period, however, seigneurial collections continued to be conducted in livres tournois with the transactions being converted to Halifax currency or

xviii Introduction

dollars in the seminary's account-books. Throughout the text, the currency used reflects that of the document. For purposes of comparison, however, in appendixes eleven and fourteen figures have been converted to dollars using the rate of exchange found in seminary records (six livres tournois equals one dollar; one £ Halifax currency equals